Arcade Hockey: OpenFeint and Time Match Coming Soon

We're putting the finishing touches on the next release of Arcade Hockey, our air hockey game for the iPhone.

For this update, we added two great features that you won't find in the other air hockey games on the App Store.

First, we added a new time match option so you can play a game of 2, 4 or 6 minutes instead of playing best of 5, 9 or 15. This is great anytime you have a few minutes to kill and want a little more game time.

Second, we added the OpenFeint social gaming network, which integrates with Twitter and Facebook. Soon you'll be able to earn up to 41 different achievements, submit your high scores to global leaderboards, and challenge your friends to match your game. We'll be adding special gameplay options for you to unlock, and awarding prizes to the top contenders on each leaderboard in December.

The new release will have a lot of improvements, including:

* Complete interface redesign with adjusted puck/mallet sizes to enlarge the table
* New physics engine with improved performance and gameplay
* Refinements to the AI (which is already the best on the App Store), improving realism and game balance

At the moment, we're working on:

* Peer-to-peer play over Wi-fi. We have this working over Bluetooth, but even after optimizing the network traffic we're not happy with the lag time, and in our tests of competing apps we found the same problem. We'll keep working on this but don't want to release it unless we're able to do significantly better than the other air hockey games have done so far.
* A killer new feature which will add a whole new dimension to the gameplay.
* A Brazilian Portuguese localization for distribution on the App Store Brazil.